Monday, August 17, 2015

The “feature” I watched
last night was yet another Lifetime “world premiere,” Sorority Murder, directed by Jesse James Miller (just what were
his parents thinking when they gave him that name?) from a script by J. Bryan
Dick and Ken Sanders, and set in the fictitious “Whittendale University” world
that has also given us such previous Lifetime movies as The Surrogate, Dirty
Teacher and Sugar Daddies. (At least this one finally and definitively
identifies “Whittendale University” as being located in Vermont, though like
most Lifetime movies this is actually Everywhere, Canada “playing” Everywhere,
U.S.) I was only a bit disappointed that Ken Sanders’ usual writing partner,
Barbara Kymlicka, wasn’t involved this time, if only because my own dirty mind
couldn’t help but imagine what might have happened if Mr. Dick and Ms.
Cum-Licker got together! The plot of Sorority Murder is pretty much the usual Lifetime same-old,
same-old: Jennifer Taylor (Scarlett Byrne) is an architecture student who’s
just transferred from a community college to Whittendale and is hoping the
school will be a home away from home, since her real home is dominated by
Melissa Taylor (Sarah-Jane Redmond), her mother, who’s become an alcoholic
since Jennfer’s dad died and spends a lot of time either drinking at home or
hanging out at skuzzy bars with an equally pathetic boyfriend identified in the
cast list just as “Drunk Guy” (Jeffrey Klassen). Casting directors Don Carroll
and Candice Elzinga deserve credit for having come up with two women for these
roles who actually look enough alike they’re credible as mother and daughter;
the suspension-of-disbelief all too many movies require when people who don’t
look at all like each other are passed off as biological relations is a pet
peeve of mine. Anyway, Jennifer seems to have got her wish when she’s recruited
by Alex Johnson (Nicole Muñoz) — that’s right, a woman named Alex — to join the
school’s most prestigious sorority, whose official name is Beta Sigma
something-or-other but whose Greek letters appear to spell out the English
expletive “Beh.” The student leader at the sorority is a domineering bitch
named Breanne Bartley (Clare Filipow, who turns in easily the most powerful
performance in the film and makes it a pity she exits so early), who’s
viciously insulting towards Jennifer and says she’ll never really be one of them. Jennifer moves into the sorority house and rooms
with Alex, who’s on Breanne’s shit list for having put the moves on Breanne’s
boyfriend Eric (Madison Smith). Anyway, Breanne is found murdered outside the
house while most of its residents are at a party being given by the fraternity
next door. Jennifer hadn’t planned to go because she had a major assignment due
the next day — a model she had built of the building she’d designed in her
architecture class — only she finds the model smashed, blames Breanne and
angrily confronts her not only about the destruction of her model but a
previous prank in which a dead rat was placed under Alex’s bed. (Thinking of Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane?, I
joked, “It could have been worse. She could have served it to you for dinner.”)

So naturally, when Breanne turns up dead, Jennifer is instantly the prime
suspect — especially since the woman was killed with a knife stolen from
Jennifer’s collection of X-Acto knives. Jennifer and Alex accuse each other of
Breanna’s murder, and Jennifer determines that the only way she can convince
the typically dull movie cops (Patrick Sabongui and Rukiya Bernard) she didn’t
do it is to act like an Alfred Hitchcock hero and find out on her own who did.
Alex is shown writing a long letter to Jennifer apologizing for something or
other, but Jennifer never gets to see it because in the meantime Alex gets
stabbed with a pen, and though she’s still alive when Jennifer returns to her
room it never occurs to her to do something sensible, like call 911 and see if
she can get an ambulance to the room to save Alex’s life. Instead Alex babbles
something about “the basement” to Jennifer, and Jennifer breaks into the sorority
house’s basement and finds a series of file boxes containing visual records of
the sorority’s hazing rituals. It’s a nicely amusing touch that the media on
which the films were taken is appropriately updated in each box: actual film
canisters in the early days, VHS tapes in the 1980’s and DVD’s and flash drives
for the later ones. Alas, the latest videos aren’t in the basement; one of the
actual killers, Natalie Swanson (Elise Gatien), gave the box containing them to
her brother, who works in a storage facility and hid them there — and,
conveniently, Jennifer finds Natalie’s cell phone after she overpowers her and
locks her into the basement. Even more conveniently, Natalie’s texts to her
brother contain the address of the storage facility — one would think she would
have already known where it was and therefore wouldn’t have to be told — and
Jennifer recovers the records, plugs the flash drive containing them into her
own phone, watches the video and learns both who the killers are — Natalie,
Gabrielle (Sarah Dugdale) and Carly (Melissa Roxburgh) — and what their motive
was.

It seems that Breanne had taken a marking pen to various parts of their
bodies and told them to have plastic surgery on those areas if they wanted to
be admitted to the sorority, and though they had the operations (I guess we’re
supposed to assume if they or their parents could afford to send them to
Whittendale they could afford to have plastic surgery) they were so humiliated
at being “called out” by Breanne they decided not only to kill her but to use
Alex to recruit Jennifer to the sorority just so they could frame her for the murder and set her
up as their “fall girl.” It ends with a typically over-the-top Ken Sanders
climax in which the bad girls have overpowered Jennifer and taken her to the
woods outside campus, where they intend to hang her from a tree and make it
look like she killed herself — “Careful not to leave any bruises,” one of the
plotters says; “it’s got to look like a suicide” — only her mom, who in the
meantime has started going to A.A. meetings and sobered up, uses the GPS
tracker on Jennifer’s phone to find her and lead the cops there in time to
rescue her. Earlier, while mom was still drinking, there was a superb scene (if
cribbed from A Star Is Born) in which mom got arrested for DUI after a bar date with that sleazy
boyfriend and her daughter, in an embittering role-reversal, had to bail her
out; the dramatis personae also include a hot-looking young guy named Darren (Orion Radies, whom
I’d certainly like to see more of) who helps Jennifer find the killers and
looks headed towards becoming her boyfriend when it’s all over. Sorority
Murder is pretty typical Lifetime
fare; it’s actually better acted than usual, and director Jesse James Miller
(will he ever get to do a movie about his namesake?) brings it to the screen
with a real flair for suspense and atmospherics, but he’s done in by the
relentless ridiculousness of the Sanders-Dick script and the sheer obviousness
of the conventional thriller tropes the lazy writers used to pad out their film
to the obligatory Lifetime running time. Still, Orion Radies was aesthetically
impressive and Clare Filipow genuinely powerful as the bitch who gets her
comeuppance … permanently.